The Vergecast - Galaxy S20 review and leaks of iOS 14, watchOS 7, and Pixel 4a

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Dr Disrespect is the villain who could change the future of TV This backpack has it all: Kevlar, batteries, and a federal investigation The art and craft of scientific glassblowing Samsung Galaxy S20 review: just right Leaked watchOS 7 code reveals new ‘International’ watchface Apple watchOS 7 features leak: sleep tracking, watchface sharing, and more Apple Watches may soon detect blood oxygen levels More iOS 14 leaks hint at next Apple hardware and a new home screen view iOS 14 will reportedly have improved mouse cursor support New MacBook models with scissor-switch keyboards are reportedly coming soon Google Pixel 4A hands-on reveals specs, camera, and a possible release window Google can reportedly revoke Android licenses if TV makers also partner with Amazon A sneaky attempt to end encryption is worming its way through Congress Congress takes aim at Google search in antitrust hearing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about Dieter's Samsung Galaxy S20 review. We go through the latest Apple leaks, Apple Watch, iOS 14, maybe an armed MacBook, and we end with a little bit of Android TV. That's the Vergecast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello, and one of the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of is it canceled yet.com.

A website where things are listed and it says yes. Turns out, I looked at the source code. It just says yes. Is it canceled yet?com. By the way, a real website you can go to is set up by Verge executive editor T.C. Sotic. Hilariously because we had our standard sort of end-of-day editors meeting. I'm like, should we make a list? And we decided we weren't going to make a list.

It just didn't make sense as a story for us. And then he went to a website. And it's gone viral and it's ruined his life. There's so much happening. It's very entertaining to watch that go. Anyway, I'm Nilai. I'm your friend. That's Dieter.

I'm Dieter. I'm podcasting from home. It's exciting. Paul Miller and I are together. We are not socially distanced ourselves. No, no. This is social, what's the opposite of social distance? Social cuddling.

No. Social proximity. We'll just say it from the jump. The big news in the world is the coronavirus pandemic. This is almost certainly the last episode of the version. We're going to tape in a studio together like this. Everyone else's offices in the tech industry, we're being encouraged to work from home. So next week might sound a little weird.

We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, but I think we'll be fine. And I do want to say we're not going to talk a lot about the virus and the pandemic on this episode of The Vergecast. Just this past Tuesday, we had Liz Lapato and Nicole Wetzman. On the interview episode, they went through it at length with us, both from the science and health side and the sort of business and supply chain side. One of my favorite episodes, I got to hand it to Nicole. It's her first episode of the Veritash.

She's brand new. She just started this in December. But her first time on the show, in the middle of just an absolutely deluge of news that she has to handle. And she did an amazing job explaining the story. So go and listen to that. The facts of the story are changing minute by minute, right? There's sort of this two-part experience of trying to cover this story.

One is that something crazy happens every day, something that. It's canceled or the White House contradicts itself or something nuts happens every day. And that's very dynamic and we're covering that. But then the sort of core facts that you need to know are relatively static, right? Wash your hands. Stay away from large crowds. Be safe. Don't do a podcast in the same studio or somebody else.

Don't just crawl into Paul's lap and start breathing on him. Like, some basic stuff. Please don't hoard things that you don't necessarily need, especially things like masks, other medical supplies. I also think it's odd that people are hoarding toilet paper, frankly, but we'll let that go. I encourage people to buy a bidet

in the processor newsletter this week, and I stand by that recommendation. That's fundamentally a tech story that you were talking about there. Right, don't overly panic, but there are some core facts about the virus where it came from, how it spreads, all that stuff, that are static.

We're going to try our best as a new site to emphasize the static facts that we know that are reliable, even while covering the sort of rapidly changing dynamic stuff that's happening elsewhere. So we talked about all that stuff on Tuesday. I know people need a break, so we're going to try to do whatever tech news we can today on this show. I also want to call out some other big stories on our site that are worth reading and paying attention to this week because they are very good, very deeply reported. And if not for the virus, they're all we were talking about.

So first, Bejan-Steven profiled Dr. Disrespect, who is an excellent streamer on Twitch, that profile months in the making. The doc, his Bezjan calls him in the piece over and over again, just signed it a two-year, he re-upped a two-year deal with Twitch. So, the story is really about that economy of streamers, which I think is super interesting. It's blowing up. It's very rich. Go read that.

It's really good. Ashley Carmen wrote a story about a backpack. You know a story is going to be good when at one point the reporter comes to you and is like, well, the cops are involved? So that also months in the making, Ashley found a crowdfunded backpack. called the i backpack which had a bunch of compartments a Kevlar system just this one of these crowdfunded promises it went totally raised a bunch of money went totally sideways she went interviewed the creator talked to a bunch of backers was on the phone with the federal trade

commission all this stuff great story amazing profile go read that and then we had a great story from our science team that was not about the pandemic about how a lot of the glassware used in science is still hand-blown by glassmakers who are like generation like family generations of glassmakers. That is a really cool video. It's a really cool story. I realize, and we get it, that everyone is very understandably distracted by the pandemic. But if you need a break, and it's fine to take a break, there's some other stuff to go read

and listen to on our site in addition to the news about the virus. We're going to talk about pixel binning. Yeah, and then we're going to talk about cell phones on this show. But we're paying attention to it. Like I said, if you want to go listen to Tuesday's episode to get deep on the virus, it's there for you. The site is there for you. We're going to try to talk about it.

I have some personal Kickstarter news. I've mentioned this multiple times on the podcast because I ordered it like three or four years ago, but the open source voice assistant has been delayed again. What a surprise. An open source community of action

projects is gone sideways. We know this is as disappointing for you as it is for us. What's it called? Mycroft. Mycroft. We're still room for you guys. Mycroft is like Bixby's older brother can't quite get it together.

It's like, that's what that name makes me think of. But open source. But open source. Speaking of things you can depend on year after year, without fail, Deter, you have a million phones to review. Last week we talked about the Ultra at length. And this week it was sort of the more default choice, the Galaxy S20. And where the Ultra was reaching for the, you know, you reach for the stars and maybe you get the sky.

What's this phrase? The S20 Ultra, let's just say it blew up on the launch padded. It's a fine phone, but it's not a great phone. They tried to do too much, and they failed. The S20, though, turns out Samsung has been making galaxy phones for, you know, 11 years now, and they've gotten good at it. Would you say that the ultra-lact focus? Oh, God. Wow, Harshburn.

I wish I had, actually. Although, to my credit, at, like, literally five minutes before publish, I'm like, I still don't have a good headline, and then it popped into my head. we'll call it Shutterbug, which is great. It was really good. Yeah. The S20, which is in my mind really just an S11, it's an iterative update over the S10, and Samsung doesn't try and do too much with it. It's got a more traditional camera, and it is way more successful as a result of not trying to do too much.

I really love this phone, and my biggest complaint about it is that I think it costs like 150 or 200 bucks more than I would like it to, because I think that there's a premium you have to pay for 5G, and although I've had a bunch of readers tell me, that they've got 5G in their area and they deeply love it, I think the vast majority of people don't benefit from 5G yet and probably won't benefit it from it until the end of the year at best. Oh, I think it's longer than that. I think it's 18 months. Well, T-Mobile's got it, and it's okay.

It's like T-Mobile's doing okay with it, but yeah. I just want to walk through the five, because this part is confusing. We've talked to it before, but I just want to get everybody on the same page. The S-20 has mid-band 5-G. Yeah, okay. So the S-20 supports mid-band. all of them support midband. The S-20 plus and the S-20 Ultra support millimeter wave, which I have basically stopped being shy

about saying that I think millimeter wave is a scam. It's like a demo. Yeah, it's a tech demo. You can only use it on like street corners. If you look at the maps, they're ridiculous. If you go to one of the places on like, say, for example, Verizon's map in New York City, you have to stand there and be looking at the tower. and if you like, you know, do a little shuffle step to the side, it might break down.

That millimeter wave will not be really real for three years at best. And even then, I don't, I just, I don't see it. I don't think it's going to happen for consumer phones. It could apply to lots of other things. You could still be doing your, you know, tell a remote surgery on 5G with millimeter wave. Sure. Point to point, static, whatever. but for phones, I just, I think it's a tech demo.

You don't think they're like deployed in like stadiums and stuff like that, that kind of stuff where it's like helps handle excess demand? Theoretically, yeah, but like when you actually use it, if you look at it in a stadium, it needs to be, there would need to be like 50 of them in a stadium for it to work. And maybe they'll do that. But it really is at a point where it's like the only thing that 5G millimeter wave has over Wi-Fi is that you don't have to log in and deal with like Wi-Fi problems. What are Wi-Fi problems?

Oh, you mean like when you're out and about? When you're out-and-about, the networks get saturated. You can't log in. You've got to ask for the password. Capit portal. It's a danger. Captive portal, hacking, all that. So 5G Miller Wave gets rid of that.

But in terms of like range, I don't see it being that much more useful. And again, I could be proven wrong. I'm almost nervous to say all of this stuff because we've had five years of like hype about 5G and so somebody somewhere is like, no, he doesn't understand. He's an idiot. It's real. And I will happily say I'm an idiot and then I didn't understand when it becomes real. But I don't see that happening for a while. I feel like that's just like a, it's like a core element of tech journalism right now is like just looking at the hype and being like, but the thing isn't there. Yeah.

Like you can't have it. It's not there. You bought a phone or you didn't buy this one, but you're reviewing a phone that costs 200. extra dollars and it says 5G on the box and 5G is not helping your experience. Yeah, basically. But it's like at every level it's like you're going to launch the folding phone and you're like, well, it broke.

Hey, hey, the folding phone does fold. It does fold. That's true. The other example that it just keeps coming to mind for obvious reasons for me is Foxconn where they keep insisting that there's an LCD plant in Wisconsin and like there isn't

And it's not, people yell at us when we're like, there isn't a plant. I'm like, it's not my fault. Like, you should be mad at the people who didn't build an LCD plan. Even if I wanted to build an LCD plan, I lack the resources to do so. To be clear, T-Mobile is the one that the carrier that's super into mid-band. Yeah, T-Mobile's got a great mid-band network. It's not significantly like millimeter wave faster, but it does tend to be faster in my experience in the most testing, but it's not like change the universe faster.

But it's a win. It's a win, and I think that if you're on T-Mobile, there's more of a case for it. I think AT&T might be catching up a little bit. But again, like, I don't think any of this stuff we're going to know what's going to shake out in terms of coverage. And especially in terms of, like, backhaul and what your actual, like, reliable speeds are going to be until more of the network is built out and more people get on the network. Right now, if you're lucky enough to have 5G, it's like you. Like, you're the one. Nobody else has got it.

So you got it all to yourself. Hooray! And the network is great. This is the story of early LTE, too, right? you would be the first person to get LTE in, I don't know, say New York City. And you're like, this network is great. And now in 2020, it's like I'm getting four down on AT&T because everyone else in New York City has LTE. And I think part of the promise of 5G is better capacity management.

Obviously, they will reform the LTE spectrum at the appropriate time. So you get even more. And theoretically, this rollout involved more backhaul. Theoretically, right? So there's just a lot of promise. But I think to the year's point, like you can buy the phone and use the network right now. And it's especially, I think, on T-Mobile mid-band, it is faster, right? It's, like, significantly faster than an L-T network.

But I think that is just like you're alone on an empty highway. But at least that's, at least that, like you said, it's all about what you actually experience. And if that's something that you can experience, that's cool, at least that's possible. Yeah. And if mid-band, here's my metaphor. Okay. Mid-band 5G is like being alone and an empty highway. She should put the hammer down.

You're gone. Life is a highway. Life is a highway. Ride it all night long. Yeah, that's right. You think of 5G and you're like, give me, give me, give me, give me, yeah. I love this song. I'm just trying to figure out what millimeter wave is in this metaphor.

The key with your start of metaphor is that you don't know where you're going. You just need it on now. What are you distracts me? Life is a highway. You have to know how I feel about life is a highway. I almost started singing. Okay. So you're on an empty highway.

So, yeah, midband is you're alone and empty highway, hammered down life in the distance. Everything's good. And that's because you know that most of the places you are, you'll get midband 5G. Yeah. Millimeter wave is the, oh, I got it. Millimeter wave is the rest stop. You can't move. You have to pull over in your car at the rest stop and go eat at the weird McDonald's at the rest stop.

That's not quite as good as a regular McDonald's, which let's be honest as McDonald's at the first place. I was going to go with a millimeter. wave is a treadmill that's stuck on high. Because you're speeding, but you are not going anywhere. That's it. That's what I was going for. Okay. Really fast, but you're not allowed to move.

Right, right. Or like a drag race. It's got like a set path. And you're done. Yeah. You live life a quarter mile at a time. That's right. Oh, my God.

The thing that undergirds all of this discussion is if you want in 2020 to buy an Android phone that has Qualcomm's best and fastest processors, or at least like their current processors, you have to get 5G. You can't opt out. Yeah. Because the Snapdragon 865 and then there's like going to be some 700 series that I'm actually more interested in for reasons we can get into again. Doesn't come with a modem.

It's not built into the chip. And so you have to have a separate modem. And the only modem that's compatible with Qualcomm Snapchat 865 is a 5G modem. So, like, if I wanted to be a conspiracy theorist about, like, Qualcomm's chip roadmap, I would say that somebody at a carrier gave Qualcomm a little money under the table to just be like, you know what, you're only going to offer 5G. And Qualcomm was like, cool, that means we can charge more. And everyone was like, yay.

And then the smoke-filled room was filled with handshakes and guffaws. Yes. If they were only going to offer 5G, why did they make it a separate part? Lovely, excellent question. I think that we might be underselling just how difficult it is to build a 5G radio and modem and the antennas in the entire system. It's very complex. It is. You remember the first 4G phones and they were just gigantic and battery hogs and like completely nuts?

The first 5G phones, the very, very first ones, weren't actually as bad as that. And this second, you know, maybe technically called third generation of 5G phones now that they're actually mainstream on the S20. unless you're like standing at a millimeter wave street corner, even when I was on 5G midband in New York, I didn't see a huge significant difference in battery. I haven't tested this enough to say it definitively, but I think they've done a better job with battery on the initial 5G stuff than they did in the initial 4G stuff.

However, that doesn't mean that it's like, you know, it's a piece of easy for them to just make an integrated chip that includes the modem and the main processor, right? Like that's just a hard thing. And like, this is still relatively new. We're, you know, just a few years into consumer products that have got this stuff. So I think it's just going to take them more time. Yeah.

I think the sort of big takeaway. Well, first of all, your smoke-filled room thing, I think, is closer to true than not. That smoke-fold room usually is at MWC in Barcelona. So, like, like, two years ago, that smoke-rolled room absolutely occurred, right? Where maybe there wasn't any smoke in the room. It was just... It was ham. It was just a delicious smell of aberico ham.

But, like, yeah, the carriers sit down with the chip vendors and the phone makers and they plot out their roadmap because the chipmaker has to support the networks that are going to get built. And the handset vendors are obviously deeply involved in that sort of conversation. So I do think there's some sort of natural alignment here. I think the other part of it, which relates to a thing that we're always talking about, is like Qualcomm doesn't have a competitor. So, like, there isn't, I don't know, a T.I. Or somebody being like, we made a chip that's just as fast. It doesn't carry this burden of an integrated modem. Handset maker, do you want to make a phone with the performance is another thing?

Like, you're basically scooting along Qualcomm's roadmap. But I do think Samsung is, like, very happy for you to upgrade your phone, so that they're not complaining. It doesn't have a competitor, a viable competitor in the U.S. There's, like, media tech in the world. Samsung's got its chips. There's Kieran chips and so on and so on. But at least here in the U.S., like it is full on, a straight-up monopoly, especially on Android phones.

It's bizarre, right? It is strange, yeah. I don't know. There might be an ex-nos in, like, a random Tysen TV. Oh, really? I'm sure someone will fact check. Yes, it is true. Like, a $400 Tys and TV has, like, an X-Nus in it.

You know that's not what I meant. Anyway, we've, like completely sidetracked from the phone. So, 5G is there. The big takeaway is it's just going to be there on a lot of flagship phones now. Great. Hopefully the network is there to support it. What else about the phone? Samsung just nailed all the fundamentals.

I was very worried about two things. I was worried about camera, obviously, because the Ultra was overextended itself. And I was worried about battery life because this thing has 120 hertz refresh rate screen. And I am incapable, physically incapable of using a phone that has that option and not turning it on. I would die. It's so much nicer and better that if I had the option there and I didn't turn it on, I would literally just melt right there because I would want it on. And in both cases, I was pleasantly surprised. Not, like, totally surprised because, like, you want to trust that Samsung knows how to do this by now.

And they do. The camera is a standard 12 megapixel thing. It's got your standard dual pixel auto focus, so it doesn't hunt for focus. The sensor, I believe, is a little bit larger than the S-10. So it actually overperforms my expectations in low-light. It's actually pretty solid and incredibly low-light and, like, completely respectable in standard night-mone kind of low-light situations. It still smooths faces. and I was very angry at the S20 Ultra for this.

I'm pretty angry at the S20 for this because if you put it in pro mode, all those problems go away. It doesn't over brighten. It doesn't over smooth. It's great. Does it still do HDR tricks in pro mode? Not as much, I don't think. But this is one of those things where you could take a thousand photos and not be able to

definitively answer that. We would need to actually talk to the camera engineer that knows what it's done, you know? Well, because the reason I ask is we talk a lot about the looks of cameras. Yeah. Right. And Samsung has its own smooth look in auto mode. But one sort of clear look that I see everywhere now because most of the flagship phones are doing aggressive HDR is when you shoot somebody against a window, it exposes the window and exposes the face. And I never see, like, blown out backgrounds anymore. They're just, they're gone.

Like, only traditional cameras do blown out backgrounds that way because they're not doing HDR. In shots like that, you can really see where Samsung has yet to catch up to Google and maybe even Apple in terms of software processing. Samsung really has solved a lot of its camera stuff with just a bigger sensor, bigger inch sensor. Because especially on HDR backlit photos, you can see that halo. Oh, really? Even on the S20, that little halo is there. I do think in terms of face smoothing and HDR, but especially face smoothing, I think it's slightly better than the ultra. and I'm sure somebody is going to do some extensive testing

and then we're like going to have a debate if I'm wrong on this or not, but in my testing so far, it seems like it's slightly chiller, is the word I use. It's just like it's less try hard. And I think it's because Samsung just needs to do less stuff because I know that the image sensor on the 108 megapixel in the ultra is binning on the sensor and then just giving Samsung software 12 megapixel photo. But I still just get the sense that like it just needs to do more crap to process that image than it does with the more traditional 12 megapixel sensor.

This could just be like me projecting all of my feelings about how, you know, big megapixel sensors work. But I am seeing like slightly less annoying results. But bottom line is like I switch it to pro mode as often as I can remember, especially when I'm taking a picture of a face or if I have an extra second to do it and I'm like perfectly happy with it. What is, is there a specific difference that pro mode like enables? Is it just like turn off the stuff or does it give you manual controls? Like what's the story? It gives you a ton of, it gives you manual controls over everything. So when you go into Pro Mode, you've got manual control over ISO, you've got manual control

over white balance, you've got manual control over the auto focus method, you've got manual control over exposure, you can change all sorts of other temperature settings and contrast settings as you want. You've got manual control over like aperture. Like you can do all that. But when you first go into manual, all of those settings are set to all. auto. So if you just go into pro mode and then hit the shutter button with all the settings set to auto, it takes a better shot than if you're in proper standard auto mode. And I think that's

because when you go into pro mode, it turns off the face filter stuff that don't get that you can't turn off in regular standard auto mode. Like the scene detection goes well. There's three levels to this show. Oh my God. Level one, Bixby scene detection. I'm done. Good night everybody. That was a first cast. It shows you a picture of a dog or a face or a landscape or whatever. And there's a little button and it, like, tells you what the thing's a scene is. When you take a photo of a face with Bixby scene detector on, white balance goes haywire. And it does more extra smoothing and a bunch of others.

Well, Bixby is just a dog. I don't know. I was just supposed to know. He doesn't know. Dogs don't even scene color. All right. So you can turn off Bixby and just take standard auto photos, but you still get face smoothing and face lightning in those situations and there's no setting to turn it off.

And I know the setting is there because you can turn it off on the selfie camera. So then you go to pro mode and that seems to be the way to turn off the face smoothing and face lightning stuff. Is turning off face smoothing going to be the next turning off motion smoothing at your, like, on your parents' TV? Well, no, because. Yes. But when you turn off motion smithing, you should like quietly do it.

And then they never know. Like this is like, you need to tell someone to. Yeah. But the reason it is, Paul, is because they're a bunch of people, Samsung does it for a reason. And when I show photos to people until I zoom in and be like, look, it looks like it's painted there. They're like, no, I like this one better. Yeah. So, like, a lot of people do like it better.

I think it's worse. I think that you are better off getting a more detailed photo that you can adjust if you want to. But if you just want something that's going to look good on a, you know, five-inch screen, you might actually prefer Samsung's smoothing. That's what they've optimized for. We have this conversation, I think, every year, five times a year, every time a new high-end phone comes out with a fancy camera idea, which is most of these photos get taken and then, like, put on Facebook or Instagram. There's zero edits. And so there is a huge incentive for the phone makers to just pre-edit the photo for you. And like maybe in Samsung's case, it's like a full-on 1995 fashion magazine edit.

They're like, where did your arm go? Your face is perfect. Like, you're wearing a different color shirt. Like, here we go. And I think there's just like a spectrum of that. But I keep coming back to, and I think most of the people who are listening to show, like, just from the feedback is most people would prefer that not to happen. Right. Well, it sounds like a lot of Deeter's concerns could be solved by you.

There's like one of those, it's like a dot, dot, dot, dot menu. No idea what you'll get. but you tap that, then it says settings, you tap settings, then you say, which defaults do you want when you launch the camera app? Yeah. And that seems like it would solve most of your problems, because you could set what the camera is when you launch it. And obviously you can always tweak it for the specific scenario,

but what is the camera when you launch it? Someone who cares about it can set it. Someone who doesn't care can have smooth faces. Truly what Samsung needs is another setting screen. This is what I was going to say. It's incredible. We're asking Samsung for more settings. Which is like I never would have imagined a world.

Wait, so this, off the camera for once, I think everyone sort of understands what a Samsung camera. We've beaten into death for years, one decade of Samsung camera understanding. There's another line of your view that really stuck out to me, which was Samsung's software pendulum is swinging back towards messy. And that I don't understand. Like, what's going on there? There's just all the stuff that Samsung has ever made is still on this phone. Like, it's still there. And they got good at, like, burying a bunch of it under settings.

And, like, every now and then they'll change the defaults. And you got to go looking for it because whatever. But they managed to, like, do a good job of burying stuff in settings and organizing that. And the presentation they gave you in one UI was much cleaner. But it turns out that if you don't throw your wacky new settings in people's faces, then they don't know it's there. And then you don't get your kickback from McCaffee or whatever, which, by the way, is, like, here. Right.

You get prompted to, like, turn on virus detection in the, like, device care section. It's like, I don't care. Aren't you protected by Knox? Oh, my God. So. I just say, there's a logo on the phone, man. Yeah. And so, like, I wish they would tone that down.

I think the pendulum is going to continue to swing in that direction. The other problem that Samsung has, and this applies to Bixby, it applies to Samsung Daily, which is the new left-of-home screen, like, feed of content. You know, Google's got it. Apple's is a widget screen, which I prefer or whatever. It also applies to some of their new sharing options. So they have a new link sharing option and a new quick share option and a new music share option. In lieu of the share sheet or in addition?

No, they're in addition to the share sheet. So link share just like you just get free cloud storage to throw up to two gigs a day to like put your shit in the cloud, get a link and give that link to somebody. It's great, actually. I think that's a stupendous service. It only lasts a day. They don't charge you for it. It's just here. There's two gigs in the cloud for free whenever you need it.

we'll make a link for whatever you throw up there in a folder. You don't have to sign up for OneDrive or Dropbox or Google Drive or ICloud or any of that crap. Your phone has a built-in, throw something in the cloud real quick if you want it. That is awesome. QuickShare and Music Share are basically, well, QuickShare is Samsung's version of Airdrop, but it only works with Galaxy phones. And like that and Bixby, I don't want to begrudge any company trying to build its own ecosystem. You've got Samsung Health and Bixby and blah, and we're like,

Oh, screwless guys. Why would anybody use them? Ha, ha, ha. But then in the very next section of the podcast, we complain about Apple and Google being monopolies and, like, everyone having to use their services. The Verge cast. Yeah.

I don't want to begrudge Samsung for trying, but they need to be smarter about the way that they try. Like, if you're going to make a new AirDrop competitor, like, actually work with Google on it because Google's got one coming. Or release an app so that it can work for non-Galxy phones because not everybody has a galaxy phone. Be the signal or the WhatsApp version.

of it. Like, we're going to be the most cross-platform and, like, safe and good version of this. I feel like Samsung desperate, with that stuff, they desperately want to copy Apple's lock-in. Because, of course, like, staring at it. You're like, we want

to build a Samsung ecosystem that locks you in only buying Samsung phones. Which is fun for two reasons. One, they already have it because Android buyers only buy Samsung phones. It's just like a sad fact. So they've only got

like 20% market share in the U.S. So iPhone is somewhere around 50 in the US, Samsung is 20, and then the rest is like a smattering of other people. It's one of the recent numbers I checked. For these phones, it's all Samsung. Yeah, yeah. So that's one.

Like, they want the thing that Apple has. They don't realize that they kind of already have it. But then second, they didn't learn the big lesson from Apple, which is like put iTunes on Windows, which is what you're saying. Like, they could fill all the gaps in Google's ecosystem if they just distributed widely and became the cross-platform thing

and then... Lock in step two. Right, and then they just whispered everybody. By the way, this works even better on a Samsung phone. This thing that we made that you love, it works even better if you buy it. You do what Apple did with iTunes.

You put it on Windows, and then you abandon it. You let it rot, you know, and it leads people to come to your phone. You're like, this hog is slowly choking you. Interesting. Didn't expect that. You own all this music, but it's so hard

to listen to. With Bixby, the problem there is they just, they need to, they had an original vision for Bixby that differentiated it from the Google Assistant, and then they immediately abandoned that vision and tried to have it do anything and everything. They need to do what Microsoft is doing with Cortana, and they need to do it real fast, which is Cortana went from like, what if we just competed directly with Siri and the Google Assistant and Alexa? And they tried that. It failed. They're like, okay, just kidding. Cortana is the AI for office. everything else can get handled by the other people that do a better job.

And Samsung needs to find a way to make Bixby have a purpose that isn't compete directly with the Google Assistant because it's going to lose every day forever. Yeah, and it's funny that you brought up Siri in that conversation. Like, Siri is not beloved. It's just the default, right? And you can't install another default and, like, you can put the Google Assistant app or the Alexa app on your phone and, like, it's a little more annoying. But Siri's still there.

Yep. Just chirping at you every time. you move your wrist wrong on your watch, this happens to me four times a day. Meanwhile, on Android, you can set Alexa or the Google Assistant or Bixby to be your default thing if you want because, you know, they let you set defaults on Android. That's great. But Microsoft's whole, like, reason for being is, like, making you productive. So it kind of makes sense that they're like, okay, we figured out what our assistant can do. It will know this complicated productivity software better than Alexa ever could.

What does Samsung even view, like, its users as being like? I would love to see that day. Who do they think we are? No, so every big company has these, like, persona decks. Yeah, this is where mobile accomplisher came from. It's where mobile accomplice. When Microsoft launched the Zoom, I think they just, like, outright, no, it was Windows phone.

They just outright, the presentation was their internal decks. Right? They were like, this is Rachel. She loves coffee. she owns three dogs and has a red car. This phone is for her. And I was like, that is super weird. And then I got all these analysts being like, no, that's actually how they think internally

and make up these characters. Okay, that's fine. That's a fine way to build a product. Like you imagine your user. I would love to see Samsung sticks. Yeah. Right? Like it has to be, it can't just be like a picture of like Casey Neistadt.

Right. Like it's got to be built out to some extent. You can see it in some of their like really cringy commercials. Like, remember that they did this, they did this Imagine a World commercial with folding phones like three years ago? And it was like a cool hipster dude, business guy in a skinny suit at a bar. And he's like sitting there and he like opened his phone up. And then the girl at the end of the bar was like, oh, wow, who's that guy? That photo is amazing.

I need to talk to him. It's that reductive. I think that's how they see it. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, it's like they, I mean, we know this. because they more or less tell us, they desperately want to be seen as the most credible competitor

to the flagship Apple product. And they're trying to leach that market away and they want to be that premium. They are! Well, yes, they are, but what do they want most of all is to not just like flex? And I think on the other side,

we do see it from Apple, that they are deeply aware of the competition, especially in the Chinese market. They're deeply aware of what the flagship funds in the Chinese market offer, and they're deeply aware. So, like, I think that's all working out.

I just think Samsung, like, you cannot force an ecosystem in the being. You have to provide utility of you. That's what I'm saying about Cortana. Like, if you, if the dream is you open Excel and you're looking at a spreadsheet and all you say is Cortana and you need to make a graph out of this. And you don't actually have to know how that function works in Excel and that the bot is going to do it for you. That is amazing. There's no way that Alexa can get there. Right.

But to be clear, Microsoft backed into that idea. It hasn't executed on it yet. They only had to fail at the first one. And they're like, oh, let's do the other one that makes more sense now. But at least that's like a great idea. Like, I totally buy that idea. And I buy the idea that actually the voice assistant should all talk. So you're like, you're still using Alexa and it knows there's another assistant with a deeper domain that it can go talk to.

And you're like, whatever. Bixby is like, what is Bixby's domain? Bigspy's domain was supposed to be understanding all of Samsung's settings. That was what it was. It was supposed to be the thing that helped you like navigate the phone itself because it was so freaking complicated. Yeah. Instead you got Bigsby seen assistant, which is like, it's blue outside. All right.

Well, this is so I want to talk about the score real quick because I read your review and I was like, this is a nine, but you're dinging it a half for the software stuff. Ding did half of the software stuff. Maybe like, I don't know, two of those points are like camera, it's face-moving. It's still not up to Pixel in terms of raw photo quality in a lot of cases, and it's still not up to the iPhone in terms of video quality. But yeah, it's the software stuff, but it's also, Samsung is only committing to two years of major updates, which basically amounts to two years of major updates. And then they'll probably do security updates for a little bit longer.

And so I ding Samsung for that. They should commit to three. I actually think they should commit to more than three, but I don't know where to stop. So Google does three. Apple doesn't really say, but it nets out, given their history, to like four or five. It's like five, yeah. Well, the iPhone SE might not get 14. I don't know if it will or not.

So, like, that's like three, that's like four and a half or so. So I think that the whole industry could be held to account a little bit. better on that. That said, for all of my griping about how the infrastructure of the way Android updates works is going to make it impossible to ever achieve Apple levels, I still think that's true. The industry has done better in the past year thanks to things like Tango, not Tango, what's the? Treble and Mainline. Samsung got their beta out like a month earlier than usual. A bunch of updates are coming earlier than usual. And so like it's gotten better by like, like, I don't know, call it 20%.

It still should be way better than it is. But I think the next move is to stop harping on how fast are you getting the updates out and start harping on how long are you going to continue putting updates out. Because, again, this thing starts at $1,000. And your $1,000 phone should last more than a couple of years of software updates. Yeah. And I think Apple has a service, you know, there's like how much complexity can we get into. But Apple has an entire line of services revenue off the phone.

And so, like, I think they're more willing to let you keep the hardware for longer because they're just milking you $499 a month for Apple Arcade or whatever it is. And that's great. I mean, that's great. It's just, Samsung does not have that line of business. That's their plan going forward. But Apple's been good with the software updates before they had these services. Yeah, but, you know, the services, ARCs started a couple of years ago. So it is true.

I'm just saying Apple has put itself in a position very intentionally. to say, okay, the upgrade curve is flattened out. We know it. We're happy about it. We're going to charge you for Apple News Plus. I don't know. They're never going to charge anybody for Apple News Plus. It's mostly like AppleCare or the App Store.

Like, Samsung doesn't operate in an app store that has like tons of whales buying candy crush and app purchases. And Apple can just depend on that in a way that Samsung can't. I do one more sort of meta review thing, which is battery life. I think it's great. I've seen other reviews saying that expression. a little bit of concern about it, but most of those have been based on video playdown benchmarks and maybe web page refresh benchmarks. In actual use, I haven't had a problem.

I suspect there are people that are able to push a phone a little bit harder and have worse battery life and actually be a little bit more concerned about it. But one of the reasons I'm not concerned even on the smallest one is there are so many ways to turn down battery usage on this phone. You can turn off the high refresh rate. You can lower the resolution. Samsung actually has a ton of battery options that are actually, like, not bad. And so even if you find that you are not getting through a full day, which I don't think would happen to you, but even if you are, there's plenty of options to get through a full day that don't radically degrade your experience of the phone. And so I am overall pretty pleased with battery life. I mean, that is

surprising and wonderful. I was expecting this phone just destroy its battery. I don't really know why. I mean, Samsung has to know that that's unacceptable, but... Well, it's because you're locked at 120 hertz. It's not, they don't try and, like, adjust it based on what you're doing. It's just, screw you are 120 hertz now, bam. But they ratchet down the screen, no, those

you do that. But yeah, it's like, it was like a thing that I was worried about. And again, there are going to be other reviews out there that are like, no, the battery life is not acceptable on the small one. But I think that for most people, especially that by the small one, you're going to be fine. And if you're

not, you can adjust it so you are. And for the plus and the ultra, you're definitely going to be fine. You're saying this is the best Android phone and might be the best Android phone of its generation. Well, I'm saying it's the best Android phone right now at this moment on March 12th, 2020. But I'm also saying that for the subsequent phones that come out that are going to have the same processor, are going to have a high refresh rate screen, going to compete on camera, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the bar they have to meet. And this bar is actually surprisingly hard to meet. Like, especially when you look at like fit, finish build quality, the whole package, um, it's going to be a tough. It's going to be tough. So I'm not saying it's the best phone of

2020, but it is the best phone of March 2020. It's a, it's a good narrow. I like it. You really, really left that door open. If I had to bet money, I would say that there's better than even chance that I, this phone will continue to be the best Android phone. If you don't include the cost of it, uh, for the next six months for sure. Uh, I could be wrong. Like, there's lots of things that are coming. But I'm very impressed with this phone. Cool. All right.

We're going to take a break and come back. We actually have some Apple room to talk about. She'll lead us right in the next thing. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought.

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Okay. It seems like Apple software is out in the world. Yeah. Just based on the number of leaks, it seems like watchOS 7, iOS 14 are out. There's some MacBook rumors. Let's start with the watch. Dieter, what is going on with watchOS 7?

So there are apparently going to be international watch faces. There's always do watch faces. Fine. You're going to be able to share watch faces. So you can be like, I made this watch face. Do you want it? And I'll be like, yeah, I do. And then I'll send it to you.

But it'll be the watch face that you configure, not like you make your own watch face. Not the thing people want. Yeah. I mean, I could be wrong, but that's kind of what we're expecting, what I would expect. And then for me, there's also, like, might be able to detect oxygen blood level. Could be important. Depends into how reliance. it is, what they actually do with that. To me, the interesting one is sleep tracking. I use my

Apple Watch for sleep tracking right now. I use it as an alarm clock right now. It's my favorite alarm clock. And I have mixed feelings about that. I'm glad they're doing it. I'm sure they'll do it in a way that it feels like more integrated and nicer. But, you know, like I like my little Sleep Plus Plus app. And I would like to see the current sleep apps on the Apple Watch have equal access to continue to succeed when the new sleep thing comes out. That won't happen. But that's my mixed feeling. Yeah. I feel like that they are now at a very difficult place with the watch because they have their always on screen.

The screen got bigger. I was not persuaded to go from my fourth gen watch to the fifth gen because they always on screen. It just wasn't. It seems really cool, but it wasn't enough to get me to spend the money. you could add sleep tracking and more health features, and I'm still kind of like, but this one's fine. Like it shows me notifications, and I have the app that does my two factor codes

that those are the things I use the watch for. That seems like they've hit that point where they're actually going to sell more because the fourth-gen watch will get cheaper or whatever. Like they're going to do their pricing curve, but the high end of the watch is sort of like, these are very iterative features in a way that I think always on screen was

like drove a lot of people to upgrade. Maybe not me, but a lot of people upgraded because they all was on screen. Yeah. I think that a lot of people also upgraded because the third generation watch got so cheap. I think that Apple Watch, there's like questions in tech that get asked every year. And after a while, they're just like, oh, God, stop it. Like, will Android and ChromeOS merge? Oh, God, stop it.

Who don't? And for the Apple Watch, it's will they try and make it independent from the iPhone in some way? and maybe, but maybe that's like not thinking about it right. You know, my personal desire is to have the Apple Watch to work with more than one iPhone at a time so I could switch to my little iPhone SE every now and then. That's like very much a first world problem. Nobody actually needs that. But like could the Apple Watch have a iTunes on Windows moment by making it able to be set up and do things on its own

paired to an Android phone or not paired to a phone at all? I don't know what that looks like, but it's been, people have been talking about it literally since the first one. And I have yet to see anybody sort of elucidate a product need for that thing that, like, fully explains what it is that doesn't just seem like a lame Kickstarter. Right. And so that would be the next like unlock, sell hundreds of millions more than they did before moment for the Apple Watch. but I don't know, like, what they could do, what, you know, what benefit, if it would actually work. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I think there's a, there's not like a tech or a product feature benefit. There's a very obvious business benefit, which is, as you are very fond of reminding people, there are more Android phones in the world than anything else. Yep. Just like, just like gaze at the world and be like, well, all of those people we will never sell this product to is just a myth. like an obvious miss. And like, if you look at the success of another Apple product, like AirPods, like AirPods, the same deal. It works better with an iPhone because of its proprietary stack, blah, blah, blah.

But you could just sell, you can just, they just sell them to Android phone owners, too, and they just Bluetooth headphones. The watch obviously is way more tied to ecosystem. It's obviously the extension of the phone. But at some point, you're going to max out the sort of like attach rate of iPhone owners to a watch. And then the watch doesn't generate revenue over time. So you sell a third-gen watch to someone.

You sold it once. Like, they're going to hold it for quite a while, even if they get new phones, whatever. That's probably fine. Like, Apple makes a lot of money. I'm assuming they... Do you think Apple does all of its, like, financial modeling and numbers? What? You know, like, their own...

The spreadsheet app? I thought you meant, like, numbers. I'm like, yeah, they used numbers, Nelai. Symbolic logic. They're not using... No, numbers. I meant the consumer grade, the never... updated consumer grade spreadsheet that ships on the iPad.

Look, there are these Excel spreadsheets all over Apple, I'm sure, and I'm actually sure they use Excel and numbers. But that's like the question is, like, where have you maxed out your sales to iPhone owners? Like, what percentage of iPhone owners ever are going to buy a watch? Once you get close to that number, you have to open a new market, and that market is Android phone owners. It's like very obvious.

Or are you just happy keeping people locked in? Because once you sell them a watch, you've guaranteed another iPhone sales. Speaking of ongoing revenue, there's another rumor that Apple's going to do, there's this thing called Seymour. It's like some sort of fitness video thing that does seem to tie in with the watch.

Like the watch can tell what you're doing. Yeah. It's like Peloton, but on a phone. I've heard it described like that, but then I read the actual descriptions. Like, this sounds nothing like Pelton. Well, it's like a little coach that's like you're on your treadmill or your bike. Isn't the whole point of Pelton?

I've never used Pelton. Isn't the whole point of Pelton that you have a live coach? Like a real person? Yes. A real person that yells at you. That's the point of Peloton. And like music that's like licensed music and stuff? Yeah, but like some of them are live and some of them are pre-recorded. Okay.

All right. That's like, like, Peloton is like what they've done is they've glued a tablet to a treadmill and like this cost $7,000. That's right. Great. But you can like go out and get the, uh, it is by the way. It's a big bat in case, say. That was a fun one. But you can go out and get the app and use it with a regular treadmill.

So I think Apple is basically building that tied into its watch for the health tracking. So that could be some ongoing revenue. That becomes the hot, around the watch. A hot new thing to do, yeah. Sure. I just think that you can do that and you can extract a couple dollars from your existing base, which is Apple skills, like millions of dollars. But overall, your sales are, there's a point in which they cap out, right,

which is some fraction of the iPhone installed base. Right. You're just being stubborn to not sell it to Android. Yeah. Or you've calculated that once you sell somebody a watch, you have guaranteed an iPhone upgrade that they're not going to switch platforms. Yeah. And that might just be totally worth it to you.

I think that's the answer. And that is like the Apple thing. Like I don't even begrudge them for it. I begrudge Apple for a lot of lock-in things, but you made a great hardware product that works with your thing and it inspires people to buy it to stay in your ear. ecosystem is like, how mad can you get? I'm mad at them for not letting them, for not letting anyone else build a watch that works at the phone in terms of messages or notifications.

Like, I think a little competition would be good. But then you look at the state of competition where you can do that on Android. And it's like, well, who would even show up? Yeah. Like, who cares about this? Like, fossils going to make a great smart watch that connects the iPhone. Like, sure. So I think the watch is like one of those where all of my normal complaints about Apple's lock-in are

They're just kind of like exploded by the state of the market right like it's not like there's a great Android smart watch So I'm like oh, I wish I could just use it with my iPhone and that is a bigger market And so like I don't know like there's just it's like one of those were reality just like my bubble of idealistic Capitalistic competition is like well the competitors suck What am I missing out on here? Okay, so that's a watch I do I do I do think this generation watch will be very interesting, right? Like, if they just iterate on the health stuff and they don't do... Like, there are some rumors that they were going to change away apps work on this one, right?

They were going to be more native. There's some rumors about ways developers could, like, more independently run the apps. But, like, doesn't this generation feel like the pure iterative generation? I think so. If they do give more access to third-party apps to do a little bit more stuff, like I would appreciate that. I still think that Spotify and the Apple Watch is not where it could be. and I think that there's like Spotify wants to be where it could be there and just isn't quite able to get there. So I'd like to see that.

And maybe there's some real pressure on Apple to let them do that. So that could be fun. But I think you should expect an iterative update for the Apple Watch this year. It seems like iOS 14 is a much bigger update, though, overall, especially on the iPad side of things. Well, on the iPad side of things, who knows what the hell is going on. So Craig Figuridi and a stock call was like, if you like what we were doing so far, just wait. and all of the Apple blogosphere is mad that came to the realization

that the iPad multitasking windowing system is confusing which is like, y'all, I've been saying. And now there's like, there's the rumor of the trackpad and, you know, mouse support. They're going to do a case with a trackpad and real mouse support for the iPad.

Right. And so what does that mean? Like, what are you going to be able to do with that trackpad? Are you going to be able to scroll? Well, sure. Are you going to be able to go to multitasking view, sure. Are you to be able to drag windows around? I don't know.

Are you going to be able to type? Yes. You can be able to text select. Like, just start going on the list of things you do with the mouse. We've talked about this. And I don't know where they're going to stop because at the end of that list is you've made a Mac and they can't go that far. Well, so this is the other rumor this week.

This is why I wanted to talk about this in particular. I mean, like, just to say, like the other iOS stuff is like there'll be a list view for apps on the phone, which will be cool because then you'll be able to find your apps on the phone. And you can already see that list for you on the watch. So I imagine it'll look a lot like that. There's a hint of new over-ear headphones, which if you're the one person in the world who cares about the drama between the Apple headphones team and the beats headphones team, get ready. Your life is going to be interesting.

But the main one is there's the rumor that there'll be an ARM Mac by sort of like the end of the year. And if you're going to do an ARM Mac on one side and an iPad with a track pad on the other side, Like that is that seems like a very hard definitional problem Well and it's a hard definitional problem that Apple has tried to brute force its way through for the past three or four years This is again one of those like perennial questions in tech like Android and Chrome merging That is like annoying but real right? What are they going to do about the difference between an iPad and a Mac? What are they going to do about the fact that the iPad still like hits a wall that you can't get past and the Mac just doesn't have a touch screen and is like sometimes weirdly complicated in its own way.

Like as they get closer together, the desire for people to help have them differentiate them more clearly is going to get even stronger. So there's a way of thinking of the iPad where it's like it's a tablet when it doesn't have a keyboard connected to it. And then you connect a keyboard that also has a touchpad now in this wild new future. and now it's more laptopy. And so I'm wondering, are there any... It's like a flat plane that you touch, like a surface.

Hmm. The thing I was thinking, obviously Microsoft has been doing some stuff for a while where it's like, okay, this is more of a touch mode, this is more of a desktop mode. But I'm thinking, what was the... Was it Pixel Go? What was the tablet? The Pixel Book Go. Pixel Book Go.

Yeah. Are there any... Cautionary tales. Wait, are you thinking of a pixel C? I'm thinking of the... No, he's thinking of the Pixelbook Go. Okay.

But not the Pixel Book Go, the pixel slate. Oh, gosh. None of these worked. Google, whatever Google tablet you were thinking of. Google made a product that was a little bit more of a Chromebook when it was docked, and it was more of a touchscreen tablet when it wasn't docked. Like, is that a fundamentally hard problem, or is it just a problem that's crying out for Apple to try to do it.

I would leave Google's attempt to turn the Chromebook and do a tablet out of it because the less that's said about that, the better for everybody. And I would look more at the surface. The fact that Microsoft tried to have, I mean, Windows 8 was Windows 8. And then they tried to like have tablet mode versus Windows mode. And I think even if people are using it as a tablet, I think the vast majority of people don't bother with tablet mode. I could be wrong.

I never. I never bother. Never bother them. The hassle of switching between those two modes is, like, it's actually pretty annoying. Because when you go back to Windows, everything is, like, in weird spots. And I think that Apple fundamentally, the idea that they would make an iPad that has, like, a pro mode with windowing and a non-pro mode as a tablet, that there would be two different, completely different ways of interacting with it. I mean, that's just anathema to them. They won't even let us rearrange icons on the home screen so that they don't flow from upper left to bottom right.

Do you think that they would ever allow like two different, completely different modes of interacting? Freeform windowing. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. I mean, Apple has this. By the way, I'm looking at Dieter's Pixel C review from 2015. Oh, from 20.

It is brutal. Here's the first line of this review. A funny thing happened on the way to inventing the future of touch king computing. Everyone is botching it. That's just the first line. So like in my mind, I would have a very clear reason to pick this future iPad that has an optional keyboard cover that includes a touchpad and our MacBook Pro. Sorry, it wouldn't be a MacBook Pro probably yet. It'd be the MacBook or MacBook Air or whatever.

Like I would get that our MacBook for coding and I would get the new iPad for the music and drawing and stuff like that. Yeah. I'm actually less interested. We'll see what they do with the iPad. They'll figure it out. I'm less worried about iPad versus Mac, and can they get that definition clearer by the end of the year when the R-MAC comes out,

than I am that it seems clear that they're going to release a Scissor Switch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro in the near future, at least I'm hoping they are. But when's the last time that Apple's released a MacBook laptop and you knew in the back of your mind that something that was completely different and probably better was coming in the next six to eight months.

Usually it's like they're not going to update this for like three years. Yeah. And better is like better is unclear because who knows how the arm stuff is going to turn out. But yeah. No, but I have a theory on this. I think they're pretty wedded to Intel processors for better or worse, or at least X86. Right. Like they, to manage a transition at scale is very hard from Intel to arm.

They're going to try to do it. The best way for them to do it is not try to just like, boil the ocean. So I think, okay, we're putting out a new MacBook Air with a better keyboard. That's like all the more that people want, like honestly, from a MacBook Air. Like the keyboard doesn't break. It's a MacBook Air. Great. You're going to buy it. You're going to go to college. You're going to be great as you study from home because of the pandemic. A MacBook Pro, you actually need a little bit more horsepower. That's why you're upgrading to that model. It's got a reliable keyboard. You're good to go. Like, they're stuck with X86 there.

and even with x86, like what do we keep saying? Like, Adobe is not optimized for Apple's version of X86, right? Like, there's just a lot of work to do on that side of the house. Then there's, like, the ultra-portable zone, like the old MacBook, the 12-inch MacBook, like one of my favorite computers ever. They haven't had anything in that category since 2017. And you can definitely put an arm chip in there and be like, look, this is going to be slow when it's emulating Photoshop.

But it was already slow because of this dumb intimately. processor we're using. Like, you've lost nothing. You've gained an enormous amount of, like, battery life. You've gained an enormous amount of, like, other performance benefits because we made the chip for the thing. So in this constrained envelope of performance, this product is better. And it might have, like, built-in LTE because Apple makes those chips.

Like, there's all the stuff they can do with a Mac once they move it to arm in that way, that they don't want to do with Intel. The problem is, and I think this is, like, a really tough problem for them, what are people going to want to do on that computer, they're going to want to run Chrome. They're going to run electron apps. And that thing is going to just like, Apple's arm architecture has never had to deal with that. The iPhone and the iPad have never had to deal with Chrome because Apple won't let them. So you build a Mac with an arm processor, all of a sudden, and then someone tries to run Chrome, built for X86, emulated to arm. Like, maybe this battery doesn't last very long at

Microsoft got Chromium running on their arm processor. Because they switch their entire browser stack to chromium and then built their own browser. Yeah, but the chromium has got like ARM. There's like there's an arm version of Chrome, chromium out there. And eventually Chrome will support ARM natively. But that's on Windows. Who knows about Mac? I've run.

So Visual Studio code, which is made by Microsoft and based on electrons, based on chromium, I have run that in Kostini on a Chrome. own book. Yeah. Do the lights dim when you're trying to be booting? I'm pretty sure there's an armed version of ESCode. I don't know. I don't think that sounds ridiculous.

The thing is what you're describing is sort of the playing it safe way of how Microsoft does it. Like, hey, let's dabble in this world and everybody hates it. We'll pretend it never happened. You know, Microsoft or Apple likes to show up like, this is your life now. You better learn how to like it. How are you shipping $54,000 Mac pros of Zon processors and saying we're doing an architecture shift? Well, if you can, I don't know that they would truly do it top to bottom.

But I think it is very conceivable that Apple could have. So right now, there's like some server processors coming out, like 80 core arm processors that are like basically possibly the best thing you can get. And so, like, if you give a lot of power to a chip designer with Arm, they can make something super competitive. So if Apple has decided to go all in on Arm, they could have a very competitive MacBook Pro processor, MacBook Air processor, MacBook processor, MacBook processor. Like, they could have the whole lineup if they wanted to. And obviously, people have been talking about for a while that the iPad feels way faster than, like, low-level MacBooks in those lines. like basic apps. So it seems

it seems very plausible to me that Apple could could just force like do a shift and like in like one or two years have nearly every Mac on arm. If they really wanted to but you know they I'm sure they know better the roadmap. I mean you know I feel like they're leaving

stuff on the table by not having AMD in the Mac Pro so like you know it would require will but I just feel like Apple's way of approaching these things is going all in like I feel like it's not very Apple like to split the baby and have X86 Max and RMAX on an ongoing basis? Yeah, I buy that argument too, right?

Like, eventually what they want is to live on one processor architecture. At the same time, right this second, they live on two, right? They live on the Intel one, and they live on the Arm one, and they're building catalyst to bridge the gap. I don't think that's like a Microsoft playing it safe. I think that's like the high-end arm performance server stuff is totally unproven. So if it happens, it happens. Amazon is on its second generation arm chip. Like, it seems like it's winning.

It's winning, but Amazon is designing it for its AWS, right? Like, that makes sense. Apple's using those server class chips to run Photoshop in Final Cut. Or try on the Mac Pro. Yeah, I'm just saying like, they're. respect, like they're repurposing a server chip for whatever they're doing. Sure, sure. For better or worse, that's what they're doing.

And sort of in the mid zone, I think you could see arm conquest that really fast. But they got to ship one and the known compromises shipping the first one are very obvious. Right. Like, if this 16-inch macrocrown in front of me, if they shipped it tomorrow with a high-end unproven armed chip, that entire review would be like, this app didn't work. This app didn't work. That app didn't work. I see what you're saying.

So they, I think they need, and that's how they manage the, power PC to Intel transition. Low end up? The first one they shipped was an iMac. Well, there was a developer unit that was a tower. But then the first one they shipped was the MacBook Pro, like a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and an iMac. And those are the first two. And they were like, we'll see how it goes.

And then like within a year, they'd transition the rest of the line. But they just did the two models first. I think with Arm, what do you get out of Arm most of all? That's at least what I perceive. Well, but that's a thing. Battery life is the same thing as performance, because if you want to do one block of work, right, and it requires 400 watts to do that, or it requires 25 watts to do that same amount of work, you could conceive of that as battery life, or you could conceive of that as performance,

because it's like a performance per watt, which is obviously what server people are looking at, but also just in the desktop, how much can you cool this processor? how powerful is your power supply? I just want a 12 inch. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just give me the thing I want. Okay.

Like Intel's never going to make that chip. Apple's going to make that chip. Intel's been trying to make that chip for so long. It's going to happen one day. All right. We're going to take a break and wrap this thing up. Paul Miller. Yo.

I got to say this segment has not been doing a good job of holding America together. Come on, Paul. Everybody's at home with their families right now. If I had to be really honest, I would say your segment is torn America apart. Well, I think I think I'm going to turn it around because this week, like every week, the segment is called, Take Me to Your Metaverse, Mr. Sweeney. Oh, wow. Tim Sweeney, who is the CEO of Epic Games, which makes Fortnite and also the Unreal Engine.

And the Epic Game Store is very outspoken. and he is really going off on this metaverse idea. I don't even know if the verge cover this, because it's like he's been talking about Metaverse for a while, but he was on this podcast I was listening to you. I just really like the term metaverse for a way of thinking of like connecting all your social experiences. The thing he's thinking about is this idea of, you know, you're playing Fortnite with your friends, right?

Now, that same friend group wants to play a Steam game. Do you have to hang up on your Fortnite call and then communicate through Steam and then hang up on that call? And then, you know, obviously a lot of people use Discord to maintain this communication. Or if you're on a console, you know, you might be using the console social stuff to keep you together. But this idea of some sort of interoperability. And it's cool because it sounds, he's obviously in a position to work on this. and he's really into it, and it sounds like he's maybe making some headway. Like, maybe you'll be able to, like, keep your party together,

jumping for Fortnite to, like, a Ubisoft game or something like that. So, I don't know, it's interesting, but what it made me think about is my current chat situation. Uh-uh. And I realized, in a single day, I used Discord, Slack, Signal, Zulip, I message. What the hell is Zulip? Zulip is amazing, it'll change your life. It's really the best thing on this list. I'm looking at Z.

Is it spelled like Tulip? Yes, with a Z. Discord, Slack, Signal, Zulip, I message, Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, and regular SMS. I used all of those things to communicate in one day. And also, I also use sometimes, but not always, there's Matrix, which is like open source peer-to-peer federated chat stuff,

telegram, LinkedIn, and Keybase. And I just feel like I feel like it's too many. And there's no way to pair back because none of them talk to each other. Matrix bridges to IRC.

So. I'm just looking at Zulip and it seems like it's slack with threads? Yeah, Zulab is all about threads and topics. And so you don't have that thing where you're in a room and two people are having two different conversations. It's all about creating a new topic per thing. Absolutely love it.

Are you shilling for Zula? I'm shilling for Zula. No, but I'm just saying this chat situation is ridiculous. Speaking of electron apps, like a lot of these are electron apps. I've got like five electron apps open just to do basic communications. A funny thing happened on the way of the future. Everyone's botching it. It's awful.

So Tim Sweeney, take me to your metaphors. The thing about Tim Sweeney in particular is, like, dude knows he's got the leverage because of Fortnite. Oh, yeah. He is, with that leverage, he's actively trying to make, like, the world more competitive. And I think that's extremely cool. Yeah, no, he does so many wonderful things with his Fortnite bucks. Yeah. Also, he does these, like, paid exclusives.

Like, to get the Epic Game Store off the ground, they spent a ton of money and they pissed a lot of people off. want to play everything on Steam because that's where they are. That's their corner of the Metaverse. I don't know. I feel like he talks really high-minded when it helps him. But also he's done so many good things that I can't fall to him. He's his CEO. He's a CEO of a big company.

Surprising. No, but I think that like, I get why people are mad about paid exclusives. But I think that that natural, this is like YouTube. Like you and I are like tweeting about like YouTube today. Like everyone wants everything to be on YouTube and then YouTube has all the power and YouTube screws everybody over. If you just had like Fortnite money and you're like, I'm build a competitor to YouTube by paying a lot of people to be here. The first thing people would complain about is like, I just want my stuff on YouTube.

And so I think you have to accept that pain to build the competitor, which is what he's doing. My playbook for creating, I've had this on the podcast before. You spend a billion dollars to create a YouTube competitor. You pay people the, you match what they're already earning on YouTube and you don't require them to take it off YouTube. I think that's the key. You create incredible amount of goodwill and you get all the content. So you have the same amount of content. So then you just have to compete on being better.

And so I hope you were trying to be better in the first place. And so if you can do that, you spend a billion dollars, but I think you're pretty far to having a YouTube competitor. Yeah. Or you could just turn the screws every time. Sure. And just to win. All right.

A few more things to wrap up here. Deter, there's some pixel leaks in the world. You were like, people are mad about the 4A. Well, people are mad at me about the 4A because I suggested that I thought that $3.99 was higher than I was hoping. I recognize that that is the price it was expected to be, and I recognize that it's a reasonable price, especially given the camera and the processor that is rumored for it, and the fact that they've gone for a sort of a notchless whole-punch display. Nevertheless, I still pine for the days of the Nexus phones that cost like $3.50.

and last year we saw a lot of incredibly good Android phones that came in at that $299.350 mark. On the flip side, if Google had actually priced it that aggressively, assuming they do, given the rumors, you know what I mean. We'd be complaining about them using their market power to steal market share. So, you know, you win some, you lose some. It's funny that you say the camera, right? Because the camera in its way is not costly for Google. It's costly on the R&D side. It's costly in terms of software engineering, but the actual part is not costly.

I wonder what would happen if Google actually tried to distribute that technology and build it into Android. You know, there's G-CAM in the world for all sorts of different phones. It's sort of a pain to configure, but like the community makes it work, XDA developers make it work. What would happen if they just were like, you know what? We want all Android phones to have really good cameras. Everybody can just use this now. I wonder. They would never sell another pixel again.

I mean, probably. I believe in this goodwill aspect. I feel like you... When did you become the happy idealist? No, I don't believe that companies act this way. I'm saying that I feel like they could get a long way by acting this way. Why does anybody not spit when they hear the word Microsoft? Because they've done a lot of idealistic things with...

open source. And yeah, sure, maybe they've sort of taken over Linux from within and now they're dominating it as a corporate sponsor, sure. Maybe you go to work by getting your job on LinkedIn and you show up at work and use the office suite on your Windows computer and then file the GitHub.

That's not a good way. That's not a recipe for goodwill. And you go home and you use your Xbox. But they like you. You are not wrong. We just did that text survey. Microsoft is like Beloved again. It's because they're, like, friendly.

But they also don't, like, they're not trying to extract consumer revenue except on Xbox. I think that's, like, a big part of it. Like, they're just, like, a happy, friendly giant that makes Windows. Going back to the Pixel, I do want to point out that it's not as easy as we might think for Google. Just be like, sure, everyone can have the pixel camera algorithms because the way that the camera stuff works on Android phones is so, so, so, so, so fragmented. It's not, they can't, like, not everyone would just be able to plug and play that stuff. Like Moment, for example, bailed on their Android app.

You cannot buy, get Android app for Moment lenses. You have to, like, use a third-party app. Some of them will do the correction, or you've got to do the correction on your own for the, you know, the lens distortion. I feel like I don't know all the nuts and bolts, but imagine, like, maybe there's like some machine learning model that Google could release. And so, like, here's how to, here's how to tune the app to your sensor using these machinations. Yeah, in the bring up of the phone, the manufacturers could probably use Google's code. Sure. But that's obviously we're asking a lot of Google.

Yeah, and I think they really want the pixel to be a success, whether or not it actually is a success. My read on the 4A is that it's probably a more interesting phone than the 4. Well, and so that bodes ill for the Pixel 5, right? Like the Pixel 4, I have this whole rant where, like, Google needs to commit to the high end or bail on it, right? they either need to take on the Galaxy S-20 at the high end, make the phone that genuinely feels like a thousand bucks instead of just costing a thousand bucks. And the Pixel 4 was supposed to be it.

It's got the high refresh rate screen. It's got the face unlock. And it just, like, it didn't quite get there. And so if they're not going to get there with the Pixel 5, then they'll release another Pixel 5, and everyone will be like, cool, wait for the 5A. That's what's going to happen to them this year if they're not very careful. Yeah.

And the 4 has not been a success. Like, they're not, I don't think they're in a mode where they have to worry about sales. Like, they just have to, like, get a hit. They've got to get a hit. And the 3A is doing pretty darn well. But, look, when they started this hardware division, I, like, got in a room with Rick Osloh and said, when do you have to be successful? I took a walk around Google's camp with the Sundar Pachai and said, what's your timeline for making money on hardware? And the answer was the standard answer in all of tech, five years.

Well, guess what? The pixel five is five years. Yeah. Well, I can't wait for the Pixel 5 launch event. Deer, his arms crossed to the back of the room. There's another big Google story. This is on Protocol. Yango Ruckers are a great story. It's a TV story. So I'm like ready to go. We've been at it for an hour. You ready to go for another hour? I rant about TV operating systems. But there's a deep relationship to how Google ran Android here, which I think is really interesting. So if basically, you know, I go story was if you are a Google TV licensee, and there's actually more than you think, because, yep, it's Sony, makes Android TVs, but there's a bunch of cable boxes and stuff. If you have a license to Android for TVs, and even in some case for mobile, you are not allowed to use forks of Android in any other product, which includes Fire TV, because Fire TV is an Android for.

So there's all these companies that would like to make Fire TVs. but because they want to use Android in other places, Google will not let them. And so, like, I think on the one read, I have any reaction stories. There's my first one. Somewhere inside Roku, there's a guy who's like, this would be so much easier if we just built this on Android because, like, we're doing all this crap with our OS that we just let Android handle it. And everybody else is like, no. And this is why. Maybe.

I mean, I think Roku's pretty happy owning their stack, right? It's still like Linux. And it's built to where it needs to go. I don't think they have like aspirations to make a phone. Certainly they don't have aspirations to make beautiful apps. Like that's not a thing that they care about. But like they're dominant. So it's like this is this like heated battle for like second place at best.

Samsung uses Tyson and they want Tyson. Like they Samsung is a dominant TV vendor. They want Tyson to be a meaningful hedge against Android that's important to them. And so that building it out for TV lets them. recoup their investment in Tysen development. So, like, Samsung's never going to switch. Like, they're on Tyson. Who's left?

Well, Sony's already on Android. You could get... I'm sure Vizio is like, well, we made this huge weird bet on Chromecast. Like, they could just switch to Android. It's probably... It would be a lot easier than going to fire. Isn't there a rumor that Google's switching the Android with Chromecast? There's a Chromecast Ultra that's going to run Android TV.

Yeah, and then it's going to have a remote. But it's like Google. Like, Google's not going to ship a fire TV. box. Sure, sure. So, like, who is, like, meaningful us? It's, like, LG. Like, LG is the prize here.

And then, like, whatever, like, house brands, insignia element, whatever. But the last huge prize in this market of the biggest vendors, it's Vizio Sony LG, right? Those are the big TV vendors. LG has, like, WebOS. I was going to say, this whole thing, you don't want to talk about Fair TV. You just want to troll me into talking about WebOS. This is just a long-ass walk-up to make me mad about WebOS. I got you.

I didn't realize you were already to be so mad about the pixel. Because now it's like the nuclear inferno. But like that's got to be like the battle here is LG is like, oh, this didn't work. No one wants to build a 15th app for our weird platform with Beanbird. Like we would like to do a riff on Android TV or we'd like to do a riff on fire because fire is dominant. And they can't because they make Android phones. Yep. That's got to be it.

TCL also is in this mix. A lot of TCL phones get sold. TCL's on Roku, so they're not... Yeah, well, maybe they would want to be on FIRE TV, too. You don't know. Maybe they want to bail on Roku. Well, yeah, I wonder. I mean, like, they're doing so while making Roku TVs.

Amazon would be happy to subsidize all sorts of TV makers to get Fired TV more market share. Are you kidding? They would love to do that. Yeah, but TCL is like, those are the big three, right? In terms of sales, it's Vizio Sony LG. and then TCL's coming up, but they're coming up because of Roku, because they're the high-end Roku TV. They're going to do an OLED this year.

Like an OLED Roku TV is a very attractive idea of a product, right? But can you imagine, like, if you're the Amazon people and you're like, let's go to TCL and get them do it. And we can't because we make Android phones. Yeah. So all of this is related. Do you remember, like, was it last year the EU said to Google, you cannot do this anymore in phones.

You cannot bar people. from forking Android to get play services. But they can still. But they're doing it in TVs. Have it for TVs. So I just, like, this story to me, like, it hit all the right buttons for me. But it's so funny because, like, everyone's in, like, 45th place to Roku. So everyone's just, like, battling for scraps.

And as somebody who owns a Sony Android TV, I'm not even like, yeah, that's, it's definitely a TV that runs Android. Sometimes it just crashes out to, like, a honeycomb. That's why it's so interesting to me that Google would actually put it on its combcast because that seems to imply that they might be passionate about it. Have you ever seen a $3,500 OLED TV display like a gingerbread-level UI element? Because I have on the regular. No, I think Google like knows. The streaming wars are here.

You just like point a microphone at Julia. You get an hour of streaming wars. Like it's happening at extremely high rates. owning that interface is the next battleground because you get to extract Anko has actually made this point too which I think is really smart. In the old days,

you, the consumer, would pay Comcast. You'd pay them some money. You'd get a Comcast box, cable box. And then Comcast would distribute some of your money to ESPN. Right? To get ESPN on this box, Comcast owes Disney $11 or some insanely high rate.

Roku is like they're going to give you the box. You just get a Roku box for $8. And then ESPN pays the money to be on the Roku box, which is a totally upset. And then you pay ESPN. And then you pay ESPN. So it's just like that whole market is inverting and owning the interface. You become the gatekeeper to the consumer in a very real way. And I think there's just that race to own that interface in a way that Apple own the iOS interface and the store gives an enormous amount of power.

Is anybody trying to do? I'm sorry to be so such a hack. But is anybody doing an open source version of this? Like, I would imagine if you're ESPN, like, you don't want to pay for access. I mean, we know this really well from Facebook. Like Facebook decided at some point where it's like, you know what? All these things that are showing up on people's walls, what if we charged brands to get there? You know, so, like, people don't want to be in that scenario.

Yeah, I mean, this is when I would point out, like, the Nvidia Shield exists, but the Nvidia Shield exists and Android TV, yeah. So there's not, like, a great open source. I mean, I'm sure there is. And I guess Android TV. But they haven't attracted. It is kind of this in the sense that Android TV currently is not charging ESP, is not paid to play like Roku is.

Right? Well, it's a store. It's just the traditional Android store. It's just a store. Yeah. I mean, it's an app store. And I think people don't perceive Roku as having that app store dynamic, but it absolutely does, which is why, like, Fox was dropped before the Super Bowl and all that stuff.

It's just, like, I hadn't really considered how much that market had flipped from the traditional cable model. And now you see, like, everybody gets it. Like, the streaming wars are here. We need to own the operating system and the home screen because that will give us the power that Apple and Google have in mobile. and I think Amazon, to Deeter's point, like Amazon wants that bad. I just want all the CEOs out there. Just take a little break, pull over your car, and think about how you can serve the customer rather than control the customer. That's the verge customer.

If you're a CEO, ask your driver to pull over. Well, look, we've run long, but the last three stories I had here are all, like, regulatory stories. Like, there was a big hearing, antitrust hearing in Congress this week that Addie covered, that was really focused on Google search and preferential treatment and unbundling platforms from the products. Like, could we write a law that shifts the boundaries of, like, how Google is allowed to promote its own stuff without somehow also prohibiting Apple from preloading any apps on the iPhone? Like, that's a complicated. So that that hearing took place. That's moving along. there was a 230 encryption hearing where Congress is debating this bill called the Earnit Act, which is horrible.

But basically they'll take away 230 protections unless the platform is given them a backdoor to encryption, which seems like the worst trade in the world. Yeah, it's so scummy and bad. It's all happening. And then the Team of All Sprint is happening because California dropped its appeal. So, like, that stuff is all happening in the world. Like the, how do we allow platforms to compete? How do we protect the consumer? How do we spy on our citizens?

You know, the usual stuff. Well, so, you know, the spy on our citizens, the angle they've taken into it is like protecting children from abuse. You know, but you know who messages on those platforms? Children. Yeah. Like, maybe it's good that that's encrypted. Oh, so you're not spying on kids? Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know, man. Like, the Urnett Act, it's going to be, it's been very hard this week in particular. If you read Casey's newsletter, I think Thursday, today, the day it came out, he opens with like, it's very hard to pay attention to everything because of the coronavirus. But this stuff is happening. Like, Congress is holding these hearings or advancing this legislation. Go read it. The Earned Act stuff that Addie is doing is really good. We're paying a lot of attention to it.

Obviously, it's sort of the interface. Case is paying attention to it. But it is definitely not on pause because of the pandemic. And the Ernden Act in particular, I think a lot of attention is coming towards. And the antitrust stuff just keeps moving. this non-discrimination idea that if you own the platform, you should be able to discriminate against your competitors. It's picking up some steam.

All right. That was a very long, very winding episode of Verchast. I don't know if anybody noticed, but I was just so excited to talk about anything that wasn't the virus for an hour, that we were all over the place. So sorry if we were a little sloppy. We're back on Tuesday with the interview episode.

We are currently scheduled. I'm very excited about this to get FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosen-Worsel. But who can know the future? Who can know what will happen between now the date that we're scheduled to conduct that interview, but I'm hoping everything just lines up and we do it. That'll be exciting. She really wants to talk about right now in the moment of the virus. We are straining our broadband networks higher than ever because everyone's at home,

working from home. So I'm excited at that conversation. And then we're going to keep doing the chat show. We'll just be a little bit more distributed from each other. So apologies if our sound quality goes a little sideways. I suspect every podcast is going to be making this apology. So just tweet at me with your best podcast sound quality apology because I'm in the market for best practices. I'm going to need one for this episode in particular because it turns out that my backup recording took, but my main recording didn't, so this will be fun. Okay, you can tweet us, I'm reckless. Dieter's back on. Paul's future, Paul. We'll see you on the other side. Rock and Roll. Paul. Wash your hands.